intelligent and rambunctious classmate
named Susan Rice, had helped lead the
anti-apartheid movement on the Stan-
ford campus. They occupied a building,
campaigned for divestment. Among
McFaul's academic interests was the
range of liberation movements in post-
colonial Africa: Mozambique, Zim-
babwe, and South Africa. How did
McFaul reconcile his desire to study at
Oxford on a Rhodes, the interviewer in-
quired, with the fact that its benefactor,
Cecil Rhodes, had been a pillar of white
supremacy? What would he do with
such "blood money"?
"I will use it to bring down the re-
gime,"McFaul said. In the event, both he
and Rice won the blood money and
went to Oxford.
Over the years, as he developed as a
scholar, McFaul made frequent trips to
Moscow, and, because of his refusal to
stay in the library, some Russian o cials
grew convinced that he was working for
Western intelligence, doing what he
could to hasten the fall of the Kremlin's
authority.They took his openhearted ac-
tivism to be a cover for cunning.
In 1991, McFaul was in St. Petersburg,
trying to organize a seminar on local gov-
ernment. He found himself doing busi-
ness with a man from the mayor's o ce
named Igor Sechin. He and Sechin took
an immediate liking to each other. It
turned out that, like McFaul, Sechin was
interested in Mozambique. They both
spoke Portuguese. Sechin never actually
said that his familiarity with matters
Mozambican came from having been a
young Soviet intelligence operative in
Maputo, or that he still was a K.G.B.
o cer, but McFaul knew the score. What
he discovered, as they talked, was that
Sechin assumed that McFaul, too, was an
intelligence agent.
It was an encounter with a certain
historical freight: a generation later, when
McFaul became Obama's Ambassador
to Russia, Sechin became the president
of Rosneft, Russia's state-owned, hugely
profitable energy conglomerate. He
would also be the most important coun-
sellor to the same man he was working
for way back in 1991: a career intelli-
gence o cer and deputy mayor named
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
On the day McFaul was preparing to
go home, he went to see his academic su-
pervisor in Moscow, Apollon Davidson.
He thanked Davidson and said he'd had
a fantastic time and was hoping to return
in a few months.
"You are never coming back," David-
son said.
McFaul was shocked. There was a
taxi outside idling, waiting to take him
to the airport.
"You came here to do one project," Da-
vidson said, "and you did a lot of other
things---and it isn't going to happen again."
"There is a file on me," McFaul said.
A couple of decades ago, a Rus-
sian friend from perestroika days who is
"still in politics" told him, "I just read
something disturbing about you that
says you are C.I.A." McFaul denied it,
but he could see that his friend was im-
pressed. The file, after all, had been
marked "Sovershenno Sekretno"---
"Top Secret."
"In government, I've seen the power
of getting a file marked 'Top Secret,' "
McFaul said.
In 1996, President Yeltsin was run-
ning for reëlection against Gennady
Zyuganov, the leader of what was left of
the Communist Party. After a few years
in o ce, Yeltsin had soiled his reputation
as a reforming democrat. There was his
strategy of brutal overkill in Chechnya
and the way he empowered, under the
banner of privatization, a small circle of
billionaire oligarchs to soak up Russia's
resources and help run the country.
"Democracy" was roundly known as
dermokratiya---"shitocracy." Yeltsin's ap-
proval numbers plunged to the single
digits. For months, it seemed entirely
possible that Zyuganov, who attacked
the injustices of the Yeltsin regime in
favor of the old ideology, could win. Mc-
Faul, who had established an outpost of
the Carnegie Center in Moscow, had
attracted attention in Yeltsin's circles
by writing an article about how Yeltsin
could win.
Yeltsin was ailing, alcoholic, and often
out of sight. He left his campaign largely
to shadowy figures like his bodyguard,
Aleksandr Korzhakov. In January, Mc-
Faul got a call from "a guy---let's call him
Igor---one of Korzhakov's guys." They
met at the President Hotel, Yeltsin's cam-
paign headquarters. "The people I knew
were on the ninth floor," McFaul said to
me. "He was on the tenth: metal detec-
tors, guys with guns. And he told me, 'I
am intelligence. I work for Korzhakov. I
am in charge of the analytic center.' "
Later that year, Igor asked to meet
with McFaul again. "We need to have a
quiet conversation about the elections,"
Igor said. "Let's go out to Korzhakov's
dacha."
McFaul was nervous, but an interme-
diary from Yeltsin's team told him, "You
are better o going than not going." He
called his wife, who was in Palo Alto, and
told her, "If I am not back by the end of
the day, tell the Embassy."
McFaul met his contact at the Krem-
lin and got in his o cial car, the standard